Private Efforts Fill Gaps In Earth's Asteroid Defenses

Hugh Pickens sends us to Seed Magazine for an update on Earth's defenses against collisions with near-earth objects (NEOs). The bottom line is that government is moving slowly on cataloging NEOs but private bodies are picking up some of the slack. "In 2005, the US Congress directed NASA to catalog 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs greater than 140 meters in diameter by the year 2020 but NASA has yet to allot funds to the project. Increasingly, coordinated private efforts are working to fill the gap in Earth's NEO defenses. Earlier this year, Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi donated a combined $30 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), keeping it on track for first light in 2014. LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and by opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move, the LSST will also detect and catalog NEOs."

Comments

Re:Arecibo Observatory is in need of funding

[khallow]

Well, the idea is that you try to bounce radio waves off of them, like radar. And you need a lot of dish to pick up the reflected signal. Hence, why something the size of Arecibo is nice.

Re:Seeing the way things are going today...

[consumer]

the problem is like in any other country the fact that the people don't know much about how their taxes are spent. i'm not an american but if i would have been i would be pissed to find out that the military gets some 20% while nasa gets less than 1%

There are many examples like that. Most Americans think we spend a lot on foreign aid, but it's actually about 1% of the budget, i.e. 20 times less than we spend on the military. And that vastly underestimates how much we spend on the military because they now shift the money around to hide many of the expenses in areas outside the Pentagon, like the State Department.

The worst part is, you know that war in Iraq? The one that we're spending billions of dollars on? That's not part of the budget at all. That's all paid for by borrowing. Yes, the Iraq war is going on a credit card. We are so screwed.

Only a politician...

[Muad'Dave]

...would task an agency to catalog 90% of something that no one knows the total number of. I can see it now:

Politician: We want you to catalog 90% of asteroids by 2020.
Scientist: But sir, we don't know how many asteroids there are!
Politician: Exactly!

That's like during a hearing regarding alkali runoff and the effect on the pH of lakes a scientist said that their goal was to get the pH down to 7 by next year. A politician says, "That's unacceptable - we want it down to 0 by next year!".